Unchained
02/24/2009“Unchained, ain’t nothing stays the same
Unchained, and you hit the ground running”
As a student, textbooks are a fact of life. In the “old days”, you took your course schedule to the bookstore and hoped you could figure out what books went with what courses and prayed that you had enough cash to purchase the needed materials. With any luck, you had enough leftover for a candy bar.
Books were both horribly expensive and heavy. You waddled out of the bookstore with your booty, stopped at the nearest bench, and gathered up the strength to carry your load to your final destination. If you were fortunate, most of the material was useful. If not, you had some expensive bookshelf dressing for the next 20 years.
I was listening to a story on NPR this morning about conversion to e-texbooks at Northwest Missouri State. Unbelievably, the administration there has determined that all books will be issued in electronic format. Granted, this decision was made easier because they issue a laptop to every student. However, this seemed to me like a tremendous leap.
I’m all for electronic versions of books. It helps when you’re searching for a passage and certainly makes carrying everything in one bag more plausible. However, the actual reading is a tremendous strain for me. Older eyes make it difficult to focus on the screen for too long and you just can’t lean back in a chair and read with a laptop.
One of the items mentioned in the news story was that “publishers” have started to adapt their books to meet the demands of the digital age. Instead of merely rendering text, they are beginning to include multimedia video clips in addition to words and pictures. I hate to say it but this gave me a vision of an academic world without instructors. Then again, I also had a vision of Grammy awards being presented for best adaptation of an original text with the statue going to a calculus book. Bleah! Begone visions!
The reality is that change is happening. Books need to adapt to shorter attention spans and new methods of instruction delivery. The meaning of words are still relevant and I still have to understand the material in order to pass my class. Until I get that neural implant from Neuromancer that allows me to jack into cyberspace, I’m going to have to read, digest, and comprehend. I may be unchained from the printed book but I still need to hit the ground running.
So That's Life? 
Was reading a review of the new Kindle and wondering how a text book would look on it. I like to mark up text books by highlighting, adding notes in the margins, or adding sticky notes. If such can be done electronically, maybe an e-book isn’t so bad.
While I applaud them and others for the leap, I have to agree that when it comes to actual reading of any long period of time, I prefer a book. I also love libraries, and one thing I truly enjoy is wandering and randomly finding a book that I might actually be interested in.
The Kindle does display text in an easier to read format and it looks a lot like a book. I’m not sure if it can do e-notes on it, but agree that would make it much more palatable as an option.
I was going to say something about the new Kindle but space prevented it. The one absolutely positive thing about his new generation of electronic readers is that it is creating a new generation of readers!
One of the things mentioned in the NPR piece was that the texts had the capability to utilize electronic post-its. It sounded to me like whatever software was being employed really did have a good grasp of what it takes to make an electronic textbook useful.
There is nothing, to me, that compares to reading a paper and ink novel, for both nostalgic and practical reasons, as I too suffer from eye strain when reading on a screen. On the other hand, I definitely see the benefit of textbooks in digital form. The majority of textbooks I bought I never actually used except for last minute review or reference when writing a paper. Rarely did I actually sit down to read the entire thing. Learning styles have changed, and teaching styles have to change with them. I would love to see textbooks being not just digital but also interactive.
That being said, I hope print never dies.